“How come I didn’t know that? Does Aunt Pari know about her?”
He shrugged. “Miss Tiger keeps to herself, but if you’d like, I can give her a call and ask if she’d be willing to let you come look at her collection.”
Head. Exploding.
Serj Sarafian… doing me… a favor? The son he’d once threatened to legally cut out of his life? I think there was arestraining order mentioned at one point, when I tried to sneak into the villa in the middle of the night to forage some of my stuff out of my old room.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, hoping he couldn’t tell how overwhelmed I was by his offer.
Hoping that I wasn’t falling into some kind of trap or trickery.
But he just said, “All right. I’ll make a call.”
Some fathers told their children that they loved them. Some showered them with gifts. Some attended every ball game and cheered with pride. Yet, nothing says “I care” like using your influence in the music industry to open doors.
Hey—I’d take it. My father was a giant mountain. You couldn’t move him overnight. This was a tiny shift, and that was good enough for me right now.
“If you think it’s still worth your time looking for this record,” he amended. “For all you know, you’ll never see this Jane again. And maybe that’s for the best, all things considered. Some relationships are just too messy.”
If there was one thing I’d learned in weeks of coming here, spilling my guts, it was thatallrelationships were messy.
And if I could sit in a room with my father and brother without fantasizing about fifty ways to behead the both of them, then I could find my way back to Jane.
Bring on the mess.
Track [31] “Everything Has Changed”/Taylor Swift
Jane
January
Sun glinted off the recyclingtruck as it trundled down the street, spilling dead pine branches. Nothing sadder than seeing a spent Christmas tree being hauled away in January.
“Guess the holidays in Burbank are truly over,” I told Frida wistfully as she panted on the sidewalk in her jingle bell harness. Not that we hadn’t milked them for all we could. Even though Dad calls this part of L.A. “the other side of the moon,” the San Fernando Valley was less than an hour from Bel Air, and I saw Dad pretty much every week in December. He took us down Candy Cane Lane to see the lights, and Norma invited me to the Bel Air mansion for Christmas Eve dinner, at which I got to see Starla, Exie, and even Velvet, who’d flown into L.A. briefly between her months-long trips to Spain and Greece with tons of stories—and was still sober.
It was a good night.
Mad Dog still wasn’t speaking to me much. Ever since our conversation about my mother at the lake, he’d been distant, butmy quitting service seemed to hurt him personally. That was just a guess—he’d never outright tell me, I supposed. For Christmas, though, he gave me an envelope containing two things: (1) a printed slip of paper that showed my name added to a list of people who were approved to fly on his private plane, and (2) the credit card I’d turned in to Norma when I left the lake back in July.
He said it was to help with school. If I ever needed it. Just in case.
Funny that something as unemotional as a credit card could say so much. To me, it said that he wasn’t willing to dive into the deep end of the pool with me—that was where my dad belonged—but he had invited me to sit in a lounge chair alongside him. And considering how complicated our history might be, that was enough for me.
Anyway, I hadn’t used either of his Christmas gifts yet. But I might.
Now that the holidays were over, it was also the last weekend before my community college classes started back up for winter semester. Frida and I were making the trek down to an enclave of shops. They were on a busy road, at an address that was technically no longer Burbank. And I’d become a devotee of the local bakery there.
Levon’s Donuts and Desserts of Glendale.
It didn’t look like much. Bars on the windows, a sad palm tree surrounded by an iron fence outside. Inside wasn’t much better, a long, narrow shop with 1970s glass display counters on one side and diner tables on the other. The walls were filled withchildren’s doughnut artwork; kids have some vivid imaginations about doughnut monsters, let me just say.
Normally there were only a couple people lined up at the counter on a Saturday morning, but today, the narrow shop was packed. I got a little panicky that they’d be out of what I wanted, so I quickly jumped into the back of the line with Frida, who panted after a much bigger dog who was standing with its owner two people ahead.
The bakery smelled of fresh spices and sugar, and they hadn’t taken down their Christmas lights. I liked them for that, even though the line moved slowly, and the stack of pink pastry boxes was diminishing as the workers behind the counter filled them, which made me anxious.
I stood on tiptoes, restlessly trying to spy over the line ahead of me. I had to have one of those pastry boxes. Every weekend, I posted a picture of one of those boxes online. It had become like the yearly tree photo with Dad and me—I couldn’tnottake a dessert photo.
Also, I was seriously addicted to the cake. It was my reward for finishing a week. And I needed one, because that’s how I had to take things, week by week. School wasn’t easy. Living in a new place wasn’t easy—alone, outside of Mad Dog’s household for the first time in my life. Managing a speech disorder throughout all of it wasn’t easy.
